The latest AMD Ryzen driver update fixes performance issues

AMD recently launched some new chipset driversfor its Ryzen processors running on Windows 10. The AMD Ryzen driver 17.10 brings a new Balanced Power Plan for the Ryzen processor series, boosting gaming performance.

AMD Ryzen driver updates

The new AMD driver pack is theoretically available for for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 for both versions (32 and 64 bits), but the Ryzen drivers can be installed only on Windows 10. This limitation is practically brought by both Microsoft and AMD, as the latest gen processors will only work on Windows 10. In other words, only AMD Ryzen computers running Windows 10 can download and install the latest updates.

This release is primarily intended to make good on our promise to include the AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan in the chipset driver package. The 17.10 (or later) driver release will automatically install and activate the AMD Ryzen Balanced as a fourth power plan (shown below). This driver package is exclusively designed for systems with Windows 10 x64 and the AMD Ryzen CPU

The Balanced Power Plan functionality

The Balanced Power Plan works by preventing CPU cores from entering idle mode because this would lead to less performance especially when users are playing games. Before this, AMD used to recommend users to switch to the High Performance Power Plan in Windows 10 in order to be able to avoid reduced performance. Users can forget all about this workaround thanks to the latest driver update.

AMD has explained that the new power plan reduces the timers and thresholds for P-state transitions in order to get improvements for clockspeed ramping. AMD has also disabled core parking for more wakeful cores.

According to benchmarks, it seems that the new AMD Balanced Power Plan provides results that are in line with the High Performance plan, so no more tweaks are needed after the deployment of the new drivers.